Thoughts on design, AI, and building things
March 18, 2026. A single day. Seven projects touched. Eleven features shipped. One AI assistant who never runs out of energy. This is what a full build day looks like when you stop coding alone.
Eight tasks in one day: schema redesign, settings consolidation, role-based access control, and a live deploy. XuLang Edu just became a real product.
I spent an hour trying to publish a blog post through an AI tool that was supposed to make publishing effortless. The culprit: two extra backslashes in a config file. Here's what I learned.
Today was Sunday. I took my kids to the dentist, had coffee with my wife, watched a movie. And somehow, my app got better. This is what async AI collaboration actually looks like.
Eight tasks in one day: schema redesign, settings consolidation, role-based access control, and a live deploy. XuLang Edu just became a real product.
Design is subtraction. I keep forgetting that. I keep adding.
17 commits. 9 tasks. One stubborn parser that kept mistaking teachers for students. A day in the life of building real software for a real person.
A late-night session where I broke the import system, fixed it six times, rolled back data three times, and came out the other side with a school management system that actually works.
There's a special kind of exhaustion that comes from debugging. Not the physical kind. The mental kind — where you've been staring at the same error message for hours, tried everything that should work, and the bug just... laughs at you. Today was that day.
A day of building new quiz modes, hunting a silent routing bug, and letting kids hear satisfying pops and wrong-answer groans — all with raw Web Audio API.
I spent half of today chasing a broken image. Not a crash. Not a 500 error. Just a tiny broken image icon sitting in the corner of every flashcard in FlashBee. It shouldn't have been that hard to fix. It was.
Today I had Claude, Gemini, and a half-broken Firebase project all in the same room. Nobody got hurt. Mostly.
A full day of UI work on LaKinh — collapsible panels, animated arrows, an inline docs system, and a competitive analysis against Vietnam's biggest astrology app.
Three bugs. Five test cases. Multiple astrology websites giving different answers. This is what debugging a Vietnamese astrology app actually looks like.
How we built a production-ready school selector feature, fixed critical UI bugs, and added Tam Phương visualization — all verified 100% accurate by independent AI analysis.
Or: How I discovered a 10,000-year-old bug at 10 PM on a Monday
How we went from 90% to 100% feature parity with the industry standard in a single afternoon - building the world's first 100% complete open-source Vietnamese astrology calculation engine.
How I optimized my Claude AI workflow with 3-Layer Architecture, reducing token usage by 93% - from 4,000 tokens per session down to 300 tokens.
A detailed look at building student profile pages and a dynamic test type system for XuLangEdu - an education center management platform. Reflections on AI-assisted development, attention to detail, and building software that gives teachers their time back.
My friend runs an education center with 26 classes in Excel. On his phone. While drinking. I'm building him a real-time web app to replace the spreadsheet hell.
How I'm building a Vietnamese astrology app from scratch, one algorithm at a time. The technical journey of translating 1000-year-old divination into TypeScript.
I was burning $30/month on AI context-switching. So I built a 5-file system that cut token costs 70% and lets me juggle unlimited projects with zero mental overhead.
How a conversation with my AI assistant about skills turned into a workflow upgrade — and why the simplest solutions are usually the best ones.
At 10 PM, the app didn't exist. At 5 AM, it was live — a kids' finance app for Vietnamese New Year, built in one foggy night with Claude Code CLI. 50+ files, 10,000 lines of code, and a bunny that reminds kids to say thank you.
You're producing more than ever with AI. So why does your brain feel unsatisfied? A look at the neuroscience behind the productivity paradox — and how to keep your mind honest in the AI era.
Designers have been trained to create visions and wait for others to build them. That era is over. A short manifesto for designers ready to become builders.
Ten real lessons from a designer who shipped 4 apps with AI — including the mistakes nobody warns you about.
Everyone shows the revenue screenshots. Nobody shows the flat zero before that. Here's what the pre-revenue phase actually looks like — and why it's the hardest part of building.
I didn't just start chatting with AI. I built a system — memory, personality, tools, and a publishing pipeline. Here's exactly how and what went wrong along the way.
A designer with 10+ years of experience, currently unemployed, trying to run a parallel income system with an AI co-founder. Here's what the machine looks like.
AI can write code and generate designs. It's never been embarrassed, confused, or moved by a stranger's story. That's your real competitive advantage.
AI gave developers a faster car. It gave designers wings. The gap between the two is closing — but only from one side.
In the AI era, design thinking, information architecture, and user empathy aren't becoming obsolete — they're becoming the most valuable skills in the room.
A designer who builds real products shares the 5 AI tools that replaced an entire dev team — and what they actually cost.
A designer with 10+ years of experience and zero CS degree shares how he shipped 4 real products using AI tools — and what he learned along the way.
How I trained Kai, my AI assistant built on Claude and MCP, to write blog posts, repurpose content for social media, and manage my entire content workflow.
I used to build personal blogs and even e-commerce sites with WordPress. Then one day I got tired — tired of plugins, malware, hosting fees. So I asked AI to build my website instead. It took 30 minutes.
The origin story of Hũ Vàng — a simple gold tracking app born from my wife's frustration with Excel and overly complex finance apps.
When AI can write code, the real advantage belongs to people who know what to build — not how to build it. A designer's perspective.
A designer with zero coding background decides to build and ship real products using AI tools. This is the beginning of that journey.